| Contact literary texts in English are growing in number as well as recognition throughout the English speaking world. By contact literary texts, I refer to those literary texts which have been created in English, but from national/geographical contexts of situation where English has been in contact with a separate linguistic, literary and soiciocultural tradition. Sources of contact literary text include such contexts as India, Nigeria, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Widely recognized contact literary writers include such artists as Chinua Achebe, Ben Okara, Woye Soyinke, Anita Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Solomen Rushdie, Timothy Mo, and others too numerous to mention.; The proliferation of these texts presents interesting questions for language, literary, and educational studies. This study, in particular, attempts to identify some of the more salient elements---linguistic, literary, and sociocultural---of two representative samples of these texts, one Indian and one Nigerian. Furthermore, this study observes how six different English-speaking readers---two Nigerians, two Indians, and two Americans---respond to such texts, by means of analyzing a think aloud protocol. In terms of response, the study examines how readers react in terms of comprehension or intelligibility to such texts, and subsequently, how they respond critically to such texts.; This study thus focuses on both the texts, the reader responses of capable readers to these two texts, and the interaction of the various contexts of reader, writer, and the text in analyzing what is both unique and potentially problematic in the reading of contact literary texts. Utilizing a sociocultural framework of text and context developed by Halliday and Hasan (1985) as well as an intelligibility model developed by Smith (1992), the reading of these two samples of contact literary text are examined for their linguistic, critical, and pedagogical implications in the broader use of contact literary texts. |
